Onaro widens its view into SANs

Posted on April 01, 2006

By Kevin Komiega

Onaro recently beefed up its predictive change management and monitoring software for SANs with the addition of replication and performance monitoring tools. The company also launched a new version of its flagship SANscreen product with support for EMC’s Enterprise Control Center (ECC) management platform.

Onaro’s newest products, SANscreen Performance Insight, Replication Assurance, and version 3 of SANscreen Foundation, provide SAN administrators with more visibility into their applications, data movement processes, networks, and storage systems.

The basic function of Onaro’s software is to analyze a storage network and predict potential problems that might occur if changes are made in order to reduce down time or outages associated with making changes to a SAN. SANscreen is agent-less and does not impact throughput because of its out-of-band architecture.

According to vice president of marketing Bryan Semple, users have historically been limited to a device-centric view of their storage but, he says, Onaro’s software can give administrators a new view into their infrastructure by mapping devices, applications, and their interdependencies.

SANscreen Performance Insight ties the utilization rates of specific storage ports back to applications in real time and historically. This feature can link the change in performance service levels of a given port to configuration changes in a SAN. The aim is to improve provisioning, troubleshooting, and utilization.

“A year ago we weren’t sure we wanted to go down the path of performance monitoring because there are other vendors who already do it, but we see performance monitoring as another aspect of providing a storage service,” says Semple.

Onaro has also applied its change management tracking technology to data replication processes with the introduction of SANscreen Replication Assurance, which is a renamed version of Onaro’s Business Continuity product. The tool helps users avoid configuration problems by tracking changes in both local and remote replication environments.

In addition, version 3 of SANscreen Foundation includes support for EMC’s ECC and is capable of identifying host machines that are lacking the proper agents for use with ECC.

SANscreen 3.0 also features new trend analysis reporting for service level violations and an overhaul of its Scalable Service Intelligence Engine to support the monitoring of more port installations on a single server.

Pricing for SANscreen Foundation starts at $185 per port. Performance Insight and Replication Assurance are priced from $70 per port and $8,000 per array, respectively.

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